He sat looking at her warm throat and face. “Say, I’ll skirmish ’round and git dinner myself,” he added. “You stay right here—or, come—I’ll help you int’ the house.” He threw the rug over one arm and put the other round her waist. He would have liked to push the stars aside for her. She put her head on his shoulder. SARAH NORCLIFFE CLEGHORN. LIFE. A singer paused upon the shore, Forever, And sung the love song, Life, with voice full free; Yet heeding, lest the song be wrongly rendered And Life be made a harsh inharmony. FRED. W. CLAUS. OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY. It was no discredit to anyone to be on speaking terms with Satan in the early days. The best of us could have tipped a hat to him on the street or had him to a wheel meet without loss of social prestige. For Satan was good people before a certain event which is a prologue to human history. He was one of the Princes of Light and moved in the best circles once upon a time, when everybody was well-bred and had a tide, like an Irishman’s ancestors. Satan was Walking Delegate to the created universe a few thousand years ago. He assumed that dignity soon after a disturbance in heaven, where he undertook to unionize the angels and was thrown out. What happened after his celebrated fall is told in the book of Genesis. He came into the Garden eastward in Eden and found labor progressing there peacefully. The man was tending the trees and truck, and all the beasts of the earth were obedient to him; and the woman did not know too much to be happy. After he had organized things, labor was a penalty and a trial to the human race, and the sweat of the brow had become a badge of punishment. Satan was not himself condemned to work. Walking delegates never labor. He was simply required to go in and out on his belly from that day, in his capacity as an agitator and promoter of strikes. It has been whispered to me by a sage who dwells among the hills of Persia and holds the modified sun-worship of the Ghebers, that Satan’s claim to the authorship of evil in the world is in dispute. An investigation is going on in the hill country, whence cometh great help in the solution of world-old riddles. It was started some forty centuries back, more or less, by one Zoroaster, who so Frenchified the religion of that day that the absorbent Hebrews, ever ready to trace the idea of sex in anything, adopted the dual theory of divinity, and were called to order by the first and greatest of their prophets later on. But in the title search of creation conducted by the Persian sages something came to light which abated the pretensions of the Walking Delegate. It was found that what he called his particular dominion was held on no better title than a quit claim, and the Jewish Prophet who set forth the unity of the Final Authority made proclamation of this also, in these words: